FreeNAS 9.3 & Motherboard replacement

[hydra1981]

Hi everybody,

I have a FreeNAS setup at home that I am taking another look at. It is two units, based on the Ablecom case (same as the Supermicro 4 bay ones). My main unit has a Supermicro Atom C2550 board with 16GB RAM and 4 x 2TB and the second backup one has an ASRock E3C224 board with a Pentium G3220 and 4 x 1TB. To be honest, I think the Pentium G3220 is faster and the platform is more flexible i.e. I can upgrade the CPU. I also got fed up with my CheckPoint Safe@Office router so I am revisiting the whole thing. What I am interested in doing is

- Put the Safe@Office unit aside
- Remove the C2250 board from the FreeNAS and replace it with another ASRock E3C224
- Use the C2250 as a firewall/UTM/load balancer etc (it has 4 Ethernet interfaces plus 1 IPMI)

The FreeNAS related question is, can I drop in the new motherboard WITHOUT losing any data? My CIFS shares are backed up in the second unit but not the super critical iSCSI storage which acts as storage for my XenServer virtual machines. I haven't figured that one out yet.

Any hints? If I label the cables now (say SATA-0 cable in the Supermicro goes to the SATA-0 on the new ASRock etc)

Thanks!

 

[gpsguy]

Yes, you can swap motherboards easily. Assuming you boot from a flash drive, you can take it and your hard disks and put them in the new machine. Usually the only thing you might have to reconfigure is the NIC (if it changes).

No need to label the cables, etc. FreeNAS uses gptid's so it doesn't matter where the are plugged into.

I would suggest backing up your configuration file, but it should'nt be necessary.


Sent from my phone

 

[hydra1981]

Thanks gpsguy, do I have to be careful about something? How will FreeNAS know that this is not a new set of disks? I have a feeling that in my old ReadyNAS setups if I were to shutdown the machine, swap disks around and switch it on again then it would think these are all new and it would wipe itself out.

 

[Mirfster]

FreeNas will be quite aware of the disks and won't give you any issues. This ain't no "ReadyNas"... :)

 

[hydra1981]

Great! I'll go ahead and do it then

I'll backup as many things as I can - any idea how can I clone an entire iSCSI drive just in case? I was looking at some HA etc but it's been a while.